Mike Davis over at Burlesque of North America just dropped a gem on me. He just announced the launching of his new blog So Much Pileup which will feature design artifacts and inspiration from the 1960s-1980s. As you can tell from what I post on grain edit, that I’m love with the design of that era, so I’m really excited to see what Mike will be posting.

Clotilde Olyff is a Belgian designer and typographer who teaches at the National Visual Art School of La Cambre and Art School’75′ in Brussels. In this book by Jan Middendorp, Clotilde shares her investigations into the essence of the letter. The book is filled with typographical games and experiments.

The Pebble Alphabets: I’m amazed by her collection of letter shaped pebbles. Next time your at the beach look under your feet, you might be standing on the letter “M”.

Several weeks ago I posted this wonderful Buck 65 gig poster designed by the Lyon, France based design duo Small Studio. Since then, we’ve been trading emails and they’ve been kind of enough to allow grain edit readers a sneak peek into their design studio.

I love the hand drawn typography often found in their poster work. In the examples below you can see the development of the type work for several posters that were designed recently.

Beautiful set of stamps dedicated to the Norwegian engineer Samuel Eyde and the scientist Kristian Olaf Birkeland. My copy (above) has a postmark on it, so I tracked down another version without the post mark at the excellent Postimerkki.

The New Year is the one man super-shop run by Sasha Barr. Sasha illustrates, designs, and prints lots and lots of posters (among other things). I’m really impressed by the amount of work, and the variety of ideas and execution. His work is a nice combination of rough textures, type, hand-drawn and found images, and fun, quirky ideas.

I’m really excited to present today’s interview. Matte is one of my favorite artists and an all around rad guy. Matte makes amazing art and lives in a house with lots of cool modern furniture. In Matte’s conversation with us he shares some of the people/things that inspire his work, the characters that frequent his paintings as well as a glimpse into his studio and home.